New iPad best features listed

Apple has unboxed its long anticipated iPad 3 new iPad. Here's our round-up of its five best features:

1. Retina display

Ever since Apple upped the pixel count of the iPhone to cram four times as many pixels into its glassy face -- causing individual pixels to disappear from human view -- tech fans have been hankering for an iPad-sized Retina Display. Well hanker no more fanbois and girls: the new iPad has four times the pixels of the iPad 2.

Resolution is a blistering 2048 x 1536 which equates to 264ppi or a whopping 3.1 million pixels in total -- a million more than on an HDTV, according to Apple. Indeed, the fruit-flavoured one claims the new iPad has the highest resolution display ever on a mobile device and it's had to do some fancy engineering work to separate these extra dense pixels arrays from the pixel signals to ensure there's no colour distortion.

The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted that the pixel per inch count isn't as high as the iPhone 4S which packs in 326ppi. So how can 264ppi offer the same retina tricking display as 326ppi? It's all about the relative distance between your eye and the device in question -- no one holds an iPad as close to their peepers as they do an iPhone, hence it needs fewer relative pixels to have the same pixel-vanishing effect. (This distance-to-device ratio also explains why an HDTV needs fewer pixels than the iPad. Nice try Apple.)

2. Better rear camera

The iPad 2 was roundly lauded as a spiffing slice of kit -- except for one little thing: it had a terrible camera. Well Apple has righted this wrong by beefing up the rear camera so you now get a 5 megapixel lens with an f2.4 aperture and an amusingly named backside illumination sensor. The new iSight camera, as Apple is terming it, also records HD video in full 1080p.

There are also a few software tweaks, with automatic video stabilisation to improve the smoothness of your video footage and built in face detection for improving exposure and focus across photos containing multiple faces.

3. Same battery life

All these extra glowing pixels will take a toll on battery life right? Wrong, says Apple -- the new iPad has the same up to 10 hour battery life as the iPad 2 and indeed the original iPad. It's a claim we'll be sure to test when we do a full review.

Keeping the same beefy battery life has one trade off though: the new iPad is a smidgen thicker than the iPad 2 -- it's 9.4mm thick vs the iPad 2's 8.8mm. The original iPad was circa 12.7mm thick.

4. Faster network technology

Apple had included LTE 4G in the new iPad. LTE -- or Long Term Evolution to give it its full title -- is the next generation of mobile network technology which supports download speeds of up to 73Mbps, a considerable bump up from 3G technologies such as HSPA (which top out at around 21Mbps). Of course real world network speeds rarely reach such heady heights but LTE should mean a noticeably faster speeds.

The only slight snag is that here in the UK we don't yet have LTE -- you'll need to visit the US or Sweden to take advantage of these faster network speeds. But Apple hasn't forgotten us: it's also added DC-HSPA technology to the new iPad which supports speeds of up to 42Mbps.

5. New graphics chip

The iPad 2 already packed decent processing power, with a 1GHz, dual-core A5 CPU and dedicated GPU, but Apple has added beefed up the graphics performance of the new iPad -- adding a A5X chip and lauding its "quad-core graphics". Apple claims this new chip offers four times the performance of NVIDIA's Tegra 3 chip -- a claim we'll be sure to investigate thoroughly when we get the new iPad in for a full review.

The A5X chip is not the rumoured A6 processor but it's still an upgrade -- albeit, with all those extra pixels to throw around, the new chip is likely to be more about ensuring current high levels of graphics performance than ramping things up further. Still, you can at least rest easy that the new iPad has enough oomph to power its shiny new face. As Apple notes: "The Retina Display on the new iPad wouldn't be possible without the new and powerful A5X chip."

6. Voice dictation

It's not Siri, the iPhone 4S's virtual and vocal assistant, but the new iPad does have a new voice dictation feature that comes alive when you tap the little microphone icon. A handy addition for all those senior managers who get to expense iPads on the grounds they can use them 'for work'.

Supported languages are British English, US English, Australian, French, German and Japanese. ¿Pero, dónde está español?